Venturing...conclusion

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..ce on
..us Venturing Into the Garden:
..us A Look at Themes in Hounds of Love
Part 1 (Conclusion)
..sk 2
Paper contributed in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree Doctor of Kate Bushology
by Andrew Marvick K4735r
..ce off
..pp
Similarly subtle but equally significant shifts
in meaning through the alterations in tense or
mode appear both in "Hounds of Love" and
"Running Up That Hill". In "Hounds of Love"
the shift occurs in the second verse, which
begins the narrative as a past event: "I found
a fox caught by dogs/He let me take him in my
hands". But as the narrator continues we
suddenly move into the present: "His little
heart
..us beats
so fast/And I'm ashamed of running away/
>From nothing real/Ijust can't deal with
this..." At first we merely listen to a
story, set safely in the past -- factual,
perhaps, but part of another time, another
world, even; memories of the huge, magical
and dangerous world of childhood. Suddenly
we must confront this world -- we have become
children again, ourselves; and the scene of
the hunt, the trauma to a child's consciousness
in beholding a helpless, dangerous, yet
mysteriously gentle fox, is presented to us
..us
as it happens.
In defiance of the safety of a historical
event, we see the terrified but passive
fox as it rests in the narrator's hands;
the heart beats
..us now.
And in fact, this crucial, transitional
moment is stressed -- almost underlined,
in fact -- musically by a single, long,
vigorously bowed {treble} F-natural in
the cello part, dubbed over the by-now
familiar ryhthmic cello obligato (in
octaves of the same note, on the opposite
"side" of the recording) that enters the
song at the beginning of that crucial
second verse. The leap into the present
(we are confronted with the
..us moment,
much as is the heroine of
..us The Ninth Wave
at the climax of "Jig of Life":
violently, with the harshness of grim
reality) from the safety of the past,
effectively connects the past event --
the fact safely remembered -- with
the
..us figuratively
dangerous,
..us present
moment of truth in an adult romantic
relationship (which the fox's beating
heart perfectly represents).
So, with the first chorus, facing
childhood fears in a forest, the
narrator sings: "Help me
..us someone",
but with the second chorus,
experiencing the new dangers of romantic love,
he/she cries, "Help me
..us darling".
..pp
With a similar use of language, the narrator of
"Running Up That Hill" asks, in the first verse
of that song, "Do you want to hear about the
deal that
..us I'm making?"
only to add, a moment later, "And
..us if I only could/
I'd make a deal with God". Presumably
this deal refers to the swapping of
gender roles -- perhaps of gender
itself -- between the man and the woman.
A transition has been made from the present
participle (fact) to the conditional
(fantasy); and with that transition is
expressed a realization of the impossibility
of such fundamental change in human relations.
No deals are made with God, the words imply.
This relationship begins -- and may end (witness
the tragic second verse) -- in the human sphere,
on the earthly level.
..pp
In fact, if we see this all too human relationship
as struggling on the earthly plane, then perhaps
we can see related meaning, at last, in the title
and its surrounding textual lines, "Be running up
that road/Be running up that building." Again we
are presented with an eternal struggle to reach
some new level of awareness -- in this case a fuller
understanding of interpersonal relationships; just
as in "Sat In Your Lap", the struggle lay in
reaching a fuller and deeper understanding of
space, the universe and everything; and just as
in, in "Suspended in Gaffa" (and here I'm really
treading on cat's ice), the struggle lay in attaining
a new spiritual understanding and self-confidence,
despite the constrictions of personal or mundane
limitations represented by the titular pun on the
words "gaffer tape".  Yet, in keeping with the
general subject of "love" which Kate has declared
to be the main focus of
..us Hounds of Love,
the struggles in "Running Up That Hill", "Hounds
of Love" and even (if we consider long enough
the connotations of the lines "You never understood
me/You never really tried") "The Big Sky", revolve
around people's feelings for and against each other,
rather than the more intangible subjects addressed
in "Sat In Your Lap" and "Suspended in Gaffa".
..pp
With this in mind both "Mother Stands for Comfort"
and "Cloudbusting" seem wholly relevant, in complete
thematic harmony with the three tracks which precede
them.  Both deal with interpersonal love -- in fact,
familial love of a very specific kind. "Mother Stands
for Comfort" treats the subject of a woman's love for
her child, however misguided or ill-fated that love
might be. The converse of the same subject, "Cloudbusting",
investigates the mutual love of a father and his son.
It is quite appropriate that one should follow directly
upon the other. And in fact the two subjects have more
in common. Both refer to the protective instinct among
family members, and both carry intimations of failure
and eventual separation: in "Mother Stands for Comfort"
there are the lines "Mother will
..us hide
the murder/Mother
..us hides
the madman"; in "Cloudbusting"
we see not only the explicit reference
to Wilhelm Reich's actual separation
from Peter ("You looked too small/
In their big black car/To be a threat
to the men in power" -- a reference to
the United States' Food and Drug Administration,
which brought suit against Reich in the 1950s),
but also signs of an almost paternal concern on
the part of the boy for his father's safety:
"I can't
..us hide
you from the government".
..pp
No-one as far as I know has yet identified
any specific source for the subject of
"Mother Stands for Comfort", although I
suspect that there is one, whether consciously
drawn on by Kate or not. (Knowing Kate's
admiration for
..us The Shining,
I might suggest as a possible source a memorable
scene from Stephen King's
..us The Dead Zone,
in which the mother of a psychopathic murderer
is found to have been protecting her son despite
the knowledge that he was continuing to kill; but
there are no doubt many other possible sources.)
In the case of "Cloudbusting", however, because the
source is known to us, there arises a great
temptation to draw comparison not only with the
book (Peter Reich's
..us A Book of Dreams) --
especially as Kate has herself admitted feeling
an obligation to "do justice to thebook"*
..fn begin
*Capital Radio interview, November 1985.
..fn end
-- but also with the facts surrounding the elder
Reich's sorry treatment at the hands of the FDA.
Certainly there are many specific references to
the subject in the song. The phrase "...something
good is going to happen...", for example, stems
from a recurrent foreboding, in Peter Reich's
memoir, that "something
..us bad
was going to happen." And, in fact, the military,
march-like rhythms in the recording may have
arisen directly from the author's descriptions of
the Cosmic Engineers, in which, as a child, he had
filled the rank of Lieutenant. (It is with powerful
irony, therefore, that the footsteps of the government
agents in Kate's film for "Cloudbusting" are shown
keeping time with the music.)
..pp
There are, however, significant discrepancies between
these sources and Kate's work, as well. A single look
at the marvellous Donald Sutherland in the film suffices
to demonstrate that fidelity to the picture in her own
mind's eye bears far greater weight with Kate than any
responsibility to the facts. (In reality Sutherland,
moustached and grey-haired as he appears in the film,
looks, I dare to suggest, a bit more like Kate's own
rather than Wilhelm Reich, who was bald, clean-shaven,
and quite stocky!) Furthermore, the gorgeously verdant
but unmistakably English countryside; the fascinating
but factitious gizmos in the laboratory; the utterly
intriguing -- because alliteratively and phonetically
suggestive -- reference to
..us Oregon
rather than to Maine or Arizona, where Orgonon
and Little Orgonon were located, respectively;
the new implications that arise from the surely
deliberate re-spelling of the name Orgonon,
itself-- the substitute,
..us organon,
referring not only by pun to Reich's
once-controversial sexual theories, but
also directly to the term "organon," an
alternative form for "organum," which
plays a major role in the philosophical
writings of Francis Bacon; Ken Hill's
quite breath-taking Cloudbuster, far more
beautiful and impressive than the originals
ever were; and even the boy's disclosure --
with conspiratorial smile -- of a paperback
edition of
..us A Book of Dreams
in his father's jacket pocket (an element
of the surreal or fantastic quite in
keeping with the gathering rainclouds
attracted by positive orgonotic energy);
all of these details combine to show that
the ultimate source for the recording, as
for the film, was the imaginative authority
of Kate Bush herself.
..pp
One final group of comments before this
rumination on
..us Hounds of Love
is suspended, these in relation to one
of the many aspects linking Sides One
and Two, heretofore de-emphasized by Kate
herself in an understandable wish to make
clear to her public the basic autonomy of
..us The Ninth Wave
from
..us Hounds of Love.
Apart from the many images which define
the atmosphere of both sides -- images
of sky, clouds, water, darkness, storms
and animals -- everywhere animals, from
the cat ("Mother Stands for Comfort") to
the sheep ("And Dream of Sheep") to the
blackbird ("Waking the Witch") to
the gulls and whales which are audible at
various points in
..us The Ninth Wave,
and back to thefox and hounds, to name
creatures from this album alone -- apart
from these, there is one specific transitional
motif which I cannot help but see as an
implied invitation to move from the setting
of "Cloudbusting" to the structure of the
whole of
..us The Ninth Wave:
namely, the dream. (Not without
communicative purpose did Kate recently
name Salvador Dali as a favouriteartist.*
..fn begin
*Newsletter Number 19, p.
..fn end
As "Cloudbusting" begins ("I still dream of
Organon {sic}"), so does
..us The Ninth Wave
("Let me be weak, let me sleep/And dream
of sheep"). In fact, Kate has shown a
longstanding fascination with dreams and
dreamlike states (I've been told that she
once described having dreamt of a long
vigil in the sea in an interview dating
as far back as 1978), and with the thin
line between waking and dreaming -- her
interest in the experience of sensory
deprivation being one recent example.
It seems to me no mere co-incidence,
therefore, that Peter Reich's
..us A Book of Dreams
unfolds in a fashion almost eerily like
that of
..us The Ninth Wave;
both develop around a temporarily
helpless and incapacitated person
drifting between conscious understanding
of real danger and pain, and unconscious
dream experiences. In fact, if there is
one thing that
..us Hounds of Love
and
..us The Ninth Wave
do
..us not
include, amid their huge variety of subjects,
images, symbols and partly or wholly hidden
references, it is --
..us mere
co-incidence.
..ce (C) Copyright Andrew Marvick, 1986